Chapter 101: Chapter 101 - Hostile Hospitality
Lucius rather liked Svartalfheim.
The realm was dead, hostile, and dramatically undervalued. That made it exotic instead of merely inconvenient. Add reliable portals, reinforce the paths, put railings around anything eager to swallow visitors, add some swimming pools, casinos and stippers and the place could become a respectable tourist centre. Stark Industries could handle the transport contracts after Lucius acquired enough shares to rename the company properly.
The thought survived until he found the Aether.
The structure holding it had been carved into the blackened rock rather than built upon it. Jagged walls closed around a narrow chamber of weathered stone, each surface thick enough to endure the realm failing around it. It was less a treasury than a tomb designed by someone who expected the corpse to object.
Two massive slabs faced each other at the centre. The space between them held a suspended current of crimson matter, liquid in the way a storm cloud was liquid. It folded through itself without spilling. Asgardian wards moved beneath the stone whenever the current pressed too near an edge, forcing it back into the centre.
The Convergence had done what armies had failed to do. It had weakened the routes between realms, opened a path from London, and left the old prison exposed to anyone curious enough to walk through the wrong hole in the world.
Jane Foster qualified.
The real Ragnarok of Asgard and its prince would have reached into the prison because a signal vanished inside it. Lucius could respect the scientific impulse the same way he could respect a starving tiger’s commitment to dietary research.
He approached the slabs with a smile.
The crimson current reacted before his hand touched it. One strand stretched towards his palm. More followed, and their first cautious movements became a single thrust when he offered the Aether contact.
The Veil of Fate would secure him from any unwanted gaze below universal levels. Bonding with the Reality Stone would change nothing about who could perceive him, and anything above the universal level could destroy not only him but this whole universe. Hence, the reason he had no worries.
Cold pressure drove through his skin.
Lucius let it enter; he welcomed it.
The Aether flooded along his arm, crossed his chest, and spread through every vessel it could claim. Crimson lines surfaced beneath his skin. The mass between the slabs narrowed until the last suspended strand snapped into him, leaving the ancient wards with nothing to restrain.
His heartbeat lost force.
The next contraction moved less blood. His lungs drew a full breath and returned less value from it. Something inside him had attached itself to the exchange between body and power, drinking the life force his Eternal structure generated.
Lucius watched the process with growing offence.
"Despite being greeted friendly, you enter my body without wiping your feet, then demand room service."
The Aether pulled harder.
His regenerative healing answered the loss. Cosmic energy replaced what the Reality Stone consumed, his body repaired the resulting strain, and the cycle began again. The arrangement would not kill an Eternal, but survival was a poor standard for hospitality. A guest who ate the host was not hungry. It was badly trained.
His immortality made death from the drain unlikely. Still, it did not make feeding an artefact with his life force intelligent.
He seized the connection from inside.
Cosmic energy moved through every claimed channel. He did not attack the Aether or try to force it back between the slabs. He fed it.
The pressure against his life force paused. The new nourishment was of higher quality.
Lucius increased the flow.
Crimson veins brightened beneath his skin, then shifted towards orange. The colour spread from his chest to his shoulders and down both arms as the Aether abandoned the smaller meal for the denser source. His heartbeat recovered. The cold inside his body became a second circulation, one that no longer tore nourishment from him with every breath.
"There we are. Civilisation through superior catering."
The last crimson ember vanished into the orange of cosmic energy.
Malekith had apparently believed he had shaped the Aether. The fantasy was almost charming. He had used the Reality Stone’s own power to alter the form it presented, then awarded himself ownership for requesting a different container. By that standard, every man who ordered beer in a glass had mastered brewing. The SMS god bless his soul, for he truly thought himself a craftsman.
Lucius was doing something materially different.
He did not merely carry the Aether. His energy fed it without the old parasitic exchange, and its presence threaded itself through structures already built to channel cosmic power. Host and guest ceased negotiating over his organs. The bond settled, Aether accepted the new supply, and became quiet.
Lucius inhaled. The answering sensation inside him was not a voice or a thought, but it carried the unmistakable satisfaction of a full stomach.
"Do not become sentimental. This is an employment arrangement," he murmured with a chuckle.
He turned invisible while the bond settled. Nothing in the chamber reacted to the change.
He restored the Aether’s colour to crimson again. The burned orange was informative during testing and aesthetically criminal afterwards.
Now the acquisition was solved. The scheduling, however, was not.
Jane still needed to find something. Malekith still needed a reason to wake, leave whatever crypt held him, and drag his people into the sequence Lucius remembered. Removing the Aether completely would protect Frigga and everything Thor held dear, which sounded noble until one remembered that nobility generated no useful data and rarely produced grateful shareholders.
Lucius extended one hand towards the empty prison.
Cosmic energy collected over his palm. Matter Transmutation gave it weight and behaviour, while the bonded Aether supplied a pattern to imitate. He built a crimson liquid that folded through itself, pulled against nearby life, and pressed at the Asgardian wards with the same restless rhythm the prison expected.
It could not alter reality. Giving an unattended decoy that privilege would have crossed the narrow border between planning and being an idiot.
The imitation received only three useful functions. It would behave enough like the Aether to wake Malekith. It would attach to a living host and consume life force to sustain itself. If threatened or restrained, it would discharge dark crimson energy with enough violence to make ordinary custody procedures reconsider their career choices.
Every discharge would cost the host more life. That was unfortunate for Jane and operationally necessary for everyone else.
Lucius set it between the slabs. The wards caught it, tightened, and resumed their old motion. No alarm reached him. No ancient mechanism exposed the replacement as fraud.
"Poor peer review remains a universal constant."
He studied the chamber through Telepathy, Magic and Technopathy, and every sense his Eternal body supplied. The decoy continued to satisfy the prison. The real Aether remained invisible within him under the Veil. If Malekith could distinguish them from wherever he slept, he gave no immediate sign.
Heimdall was the more interesting question.
The guardian attached to Gjallarhorn in the MCU was not the figure Lucius remembered from the comics. Idris Elba had played the role splendidly. Lucius had never felt personally injured by changing the race of a Norse god, since he was neither Norse nor burdened with the exhausting need to be offended on behalf of strangers. The people of Scandinavia might have held a different view. They had at least paid the cultural deposit.
The casting argument mattered less than the power behind the eyes. Would this transformed wielder of Gjallarhorn see Jane after the imitation parasatise her, or would the fake Aether’s nature obscure its host? More importantly, would he see Lucius carrying the original?
The Veil returned no pressure. No distant gaze touched him as far as he was aware.
Lucius accepted the lack of evidence as permission to leave before evidence developed an opinion.
He gave Svartalfheim one last appraisal. The realm remained a ruin, but ruin was merely property awaiting aggressive management. He floated from the chamber, found the spatial weakness through which he had entered, and returned by the same route.
--
Jane Foster came back with nothing resembling preparation.
Darcy and the intern were still playing with displaced gravity in the larger warehouse, which had already eaten a set of car keys and returned them from a point several feet above the floor. Jane had watched space misplace solid objects. She had lost every signal sent into the stable anomaly. Any competent scientist would have isolated the site, found protective equipment, prepared remote sampling tools, and considered whether an unknown substance might be toxic, infectious, or alive.
Jane sucked through in the clothes she had worn to a failed date.
The stable anomaly returned her to the same passage. She did not mark the route, secure a line, or test the surfaces ahead. She followed the impossible readings deeper into an alien ruin because curiosity had apparently eaten the portion of her education devoted to safety.
The crimson substance between the slabs made every caution feel justified.
It moved when she did.
Jane stopped outside arm’s reach and raised the sensor. The display filled with values that did not belong in the same experiment. Energy rose while local temperature held. The mass registered neither liquid nor gas, then produced a density reading without adding measurable weight to the room.
That was the point where training should have defeated impulse.
Jane reached in with her bare hand.
The imitation crossed the distance before she made contact. Crimson matter wrapped her forearm and drove beneath her skin, climbed towards her shoulder, and struck through her chest.
She jerked backwards and swept her other hand across the crimson current as if an alien parasite burrowing into her body were a smudge she could wipe from a kitchen counter.
Her safety line went slack when she vanished from the chamber.
-
Lucius waited inside the warehouse until Jane returned.
The decoy had carried her back without assistance. She lay unconscious near the stable anomaly, breathing, with crimson light moving beneath her skin whenever the imitation needed more life. Darcy and the intern found her within minutes. Panic followed, then a call for emergency services, then several calls from people attempting to explain why an ambulance required access to a building whose interior occasionally misplaced gravity.
Lucius remained invisible above them and monitored the decoy.
It held to its design. No reality alteration answered Jane’s distress. Its energy remained finite except for what it drew from her. It imitated the Aether’s outward behaviour and nothing more.
Police arrived before anyone with equipment useful enough to object.
Lucius left through a broken upper window, crossed the roof, and dismissed his invisibility outside. He waited long enough to make his arrival plausible, then walked back through the main entrance as if the gathering lights and uniforms had attracted him from the street.
New York had made disguising fame more difficult. One officer recognised him before Lucius crossed the taped boundary.
He was British. The constable had no firearm to lower, and an armed unit probably would not have aimed one at Lucius if they caught him red-handed stabbing someone. British police could watch the knife enter, request that the attacker reconsider his choices, and spend the next hour protecting the scene from anyone rude enough to interrupt the stabbing. By the time an authorised marksman arrived, the corpse would have cooled, the murderer would have gone home, and a senior officer would be explaining that public safety remained their highest priority.
The constable settled for touching his radio and looking professionally available for the inquiry afterwards.
The Battle of New York had given the public proof of his power. His declaration afterwards had given everyone a sentence to misuse. Enhanced separatists treated his refusal to lift another finger for ungrateful humans as an endorsement of withdrawal. Human separatists repeated the same declaration while arguing that mutants deserved the abuse inflicted on them because even Lucius Noctis wanted nothing to do with humanity.
Both sides had converted his grievance into campaign material. Neither had offered royalties.
They agreed on one useful point. Lucius was extremely powerful, and provoking him carried poor long-term value.
Most people could comprehend that without a diagram.
Darcy Lewis was not most people.
She stepped between him and Jane with her stun gun already raised. The prongs aimed at the centre of his chest, which was an ambitious target on a man at least a foot taller than everyone around him.
"Stop right there."
Lucius looked at the weapon, then at the woman who had tased Thor twice and apparently interpreted survival as professional certification.
"Miss, lower that toy. I have little patience for guns aimed at me, whether they fire bullets or not."
Darcy tightened her grip. "I know who you are."
"Then this is not ignorance. How refreshing."
He glanced past her towards Jane. Crimson energy surged beneath the scientist’s skin as she was starting to wake. One of the officers reached for her arm.
The warehouse filled with red light.
Lucius caught the officer touching Jane before the discharge struck. He wrapped the other constables in a telekinetic barrier for the simple reason that dead policemen generated paperwork, witnesses, irritating questions and good karma.
Darcy and the intern received no such consideration.
A dark crimson wave crossed the warehouse. Darcy left the floor with the stun gun still in her hand and crashed through a stack of rotting cartons. The intern clipped a wooden post, spun once, and disappeared behind a discarded workbench. Loose boards were torn from a partition.
Jane’s body arched. The imitation drew another pint of life from her to pay for the violence, exactly as designed.
Lucius lowered the protected officer beside the other constables. No broken spine, no crushed skull, and several official witnesses who had watched him save lives despite the heroic resistance of British policing. Administrative mercy remained thankless work.
Darcy looked from Jane to the wrecked partition. Her aim returned to Lucius.
"You did that."
"I have been blamed for more with less evidence."
She fired the stun gun.
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